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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

May be it's just me, but I don't really care about design at all. I'm perfectly fine with huge tower or some reasonable fan noise. What I care is price, durability, extendability, repairability, and, of course, performance. I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad.

I'm actually opposed to thin things or design aberrations like trash can mac. I'm paying for that after all, with money or engineering trade-offs.

The best of both worlds would be officially supported hackintosh (that is, curated list of hardware parts, which are guaranteed to work for some reasonable period (15 years or something like that). But I don't think that would happen, Apple is greedy corporation and wants piece of pie from everything.

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> May be it's just me, but I don't really care about design at all.

> I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad.

I think it's safe to say that you fall outside of Apple's target demographic.

I think the OP was referring that he doesn't care about the design of the machine, not that he doesn't care about design as in development.

> Maybe it's just me

It is. I don't care a lot about design either (although I care a lot about user experience), but many people /do/ care for design, and are willing to pay a premium to get that design.

Honest question: what percent of Pro Mac users care more about design than performance? I get that lots of creatives (who might care about design) use Macs, but in the Pro community the sense I get is that performance (and expandability) are relatively more important. That's why the trash can Mac Pro was not particularly popular, to say the least.

The trash can Mac Pro is definitely too much form for too little function - but letting the pendulum swing back the other way is IMO also bad.

The previous tower Mac Pros are massive machines - massive beyond the point of practicality for many purposes. They're also insanely heavy to the point of impracticality. Not all pros want/can live with something 3 feet tall that consumes several square feet of floor space.

The "right" path forward for the pro-desktop Mac is IMO something in between - something that maximizes extensibility and versatility without completely embracing the gigantor-ATX-case-on-the-floor direction.

I'm wondering about the practicality of something more like mini-ITX - small enough to be practical, but allowing access to all the core bits (RAM, CPU, GPU, HDDs).

Having max settle on desktop-class ITX motherboards would be huge... having the MB themselves be user purchasable would be beyond awesome. Buy a known quantity board with wireless/btle and an apple boot system, throw in your own cpu, ram, ssd, either onboard or offboard video, and you've still got a decent DIY system.

Apple could sell the full systems with a great looking case, and DIY enthusiasts could have a fast path to a hackintosh with a MB that's far less likely to blow up when updates happen.

Yes I am always amazed at this because this should be a natural conclusion to any right minded person who reads the words "pro".

I guess there is a space where it matters more and one where it matters less (at least for me).

Something like a notebook or a smartphone? Thin, light, and pretty have a bit more bearing on these things because you carry them around and other people see them. The value you place on this sort of "form v. function" balance will vary but I can certainly see how "form" can have some legit worth.

But with a high-end workstation I feel that there's much less of an argument to be made for the importance of "form" past a more basic level of build quality and form factor. It might matter a little bit more on a workstation than something like a server that lives in a rack 24/7 but when considering a high-powered workstation purchase, I care very little about it being thin, light, pretty, or unique in shape. Power, flexibility, and "upgradeability" matter vastly more.

And don't forget that "design" doesn't just mean estethics. Design is also usability, maintainability etc. Good product design makes a product easy to use too, not just nice to look at.

"(15 years or something like that)"

I'm curious how you came up with that number? Are you currently still using anything PC related from 2002?

Not op, but basically:

Most of my pc cases are easily 15 years old. They have been upgraded when needed and have none of the same parts, but at no point did I have to trash the entire thing and start over. Just the simple standard of having mobos and pss fit has been incredibly useful in decreasing waste, both physical and monitary. Obviously this whole poiny is moot with apples current hardware strategy becoming even more untouchable black box like.

And i'm on HN so I obviously use a model M from the late 80s early 90s. No scarcasm here.

My old computers are working fine. I've gifted them to other people, but I care about devices working for a long time. But really nowadays computers are not progressing that much. Unless something very revolutionary happens, the difference between 2017 and 2032 computer will be much less than difference between 2002 and 2017. So it's perfectly reasonable to assume that people will use computers from 2017 (especially high-end computers) after 15 years.

I feel skeptical about that. 2002 was seeing Pentium IIIs being released that could support usually a maximum of 256MB of RAM (512MB on the very latest high end models). I don't see much in the way of web browsing these days working with that.

You don't care about design, size, or noise, you want something cheap, you want repairability, you don't like the designs Apple favours like thinness and the Pro design, you aren't into macOS…

Why do you want a Hackintosh? It sounds like you want the exact opposite of a Mac.

macOS is popular among developers, so it's a good option, because almost every software piece will work there. iOS development is hardly possible outside of macOS and I have iOS work sometimes, so it's useful for this too.

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